Obama’s Climate Change Speech Ignores Science & EU Experience

President Obama was playing to his most extreme “green” constituency in his climate and energy speech at Georgetown University today, blasting global warming skeptics as “flat-earth society” ostriches with their heads in the sand. President Obama said he does not have "patience for anyone who denies that this problem is real."

"We don't have time for a meeting of the flat-Earth society," Obama said. "Sticking your head in the sand might make you feel safer, but it's not going to protect you from the coming storm." Obama claimed that the call for urgent action to stem the threat of global warming is based on the "overwhelming judgment of science, of chemistry, of physics, and millions of measurements."

The president apparently has not gotten the memos; his Oval Office staff must be keeping him in the dark concerning very important recent developments in climate science and even more significant developments in climate and energy policies. As we reported yesterday, some of the leading voices in the global warming alarmist choir have been admitting that the climate catastrophes predicted by the computer models have not materialized and that the alleged “scientific consensus” is a fraud. The influential British journal, The Economist, suggested in an article on June 20, that “the public has been systematically deceived” for years with all this talk of certainty and consensus about dire consequences attributed to man-made, or anthropogenic, global warming (AGW), and the supposed urgent need for drastic, costly, painful public policies to address the “crisis.”

"The planet is warming. Human activity is contributing to it," Obama said in his Georgetown speech.

The president seems to be unaware that even top climate alarmists have admitted that there has been no evidence of global warming for at least the past 15 years. This absence of warming has been the source of much head scratching, debating, and theorizing in the climate activist circles. As we have reported, the UK Met Office and Professor Phil Jones, the former director of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, are among the many alarmists who have been forced to acknowledge the reality of the lack of any warming trend or crisis. The New American’s recent articles (see below) on the false consensus list dozens of top scientists who have defected from the alarmist ranks, and provide links showing literally thousands of scientists contest the warming theories President Obama champions as the basis for his energy policy proposals.

The president’s energy program, outlined in this White House Fact Sheet and detailed in “The President’s Climate Action Plan,” both released today, would place onerous new restrictions on coal fired power plants and other fossil fuels and would direct billions more dollars into funding “renewable energy” sources, such as solar and wind. As we have reported, these are policies that have already proven to be enormously wasteful here in the United States, and in Germany and other European nations (see here and here) have proven to be disastrous.

Spain has already shown us the destruction that can be wrought by the kind of government-mandated “green jobs" President Obama is proposing. Dr. Gabriel Calzada Álvarez is an Associate Professor at King Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Spain, where he teaches Applied Economics at the Environmental Science Faculty. In March 2009, along with two colleagues from the same University, Dr. Calzada released a major study on the Spanish experience with “green jobs.”

In testimony to the U.S. Congress, before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, Prof. Calzada presented highlights from the study, including these sobering facts:

• For every 1 green job financed by Spanish taxpayers, 2.2 jobs were lost as an opportunity cost.

• Only 1 out of 10 green job contracts were in maintenance and operation of already installed plants, and most of the rest of the working positions are only sustainable in an expansive environment related to high subsidies.

• Since 2000, Spain has committed €571,138 ($753,778) per each “green job,”

• Those programs resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,500 jobs.

• Each “green” megawatt installed on average destroyed 5.39 jobs elsewhere in the economy, and in the case of solar photovoltaics, the number reaches 8.99 jobs per megawatt hour installed.

“Spain has already attempted to lead the world in a clean energy transformation,” Dr. Calzada told the congressmen. “But our research shows that Spain’s policies were economically destructive. When the president of a country with a relatively low unemployment rate like the US decides to learn how to create jobs from a country like Spain with the highest unemployment rate among developed countries, it should be in a field where that country has a demonstrable track record of job creation. Unfortunately, this is not the case of job creation in Spain through public support for renewable energy.”

James Lovelock, considered by many to be one of the “founding father” scientists of the environmentalist movement in the U.K., has been unsparing in his criticism of wind power and his former global-warming alarmism, which he now says grossly exaggerated the non-crisis of climate change. Professor Fritz Vahrenholt, one of Germany’s most famous “greens” and a longtime AGW alarmist and champion of renewable energies, has likewise admitted to having been very, very wrong on these matters. Like Lovelock and many other leading scientists, Vahrenholt is calling for an end to the climate change hysteria and an end to the "green" lobby attacks on conventional fossil fuels.

“The Myth of Green Energy Jobs: The European Experience,” by the American Enterprise Institute, is one of many reports that surveys the economic and environmental disasters caused by renewable energy policies in the EU. This report focuses on the renewables follies in Denmark, Italy, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

Even MSM organs such as USA Today, which normally hew to the climate catastrophist line, have reported on Europe’s renewables debacle. Instead of trying to ridicule renowned scientist skeptics by recycling Al Gore's tired and discredited quips about scientific consensus and "flat-earth society" opponents, President Obama's speechwriters would serve him better by acquainting him with more of the latest climate research and analyses of the failed energy policies of those countries that have already gone down the road the president is proposing for us.

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